We must look to events and trends much closer to our own time

Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice, pages 16-17. One of the reasons I like Sowell so much is that he constantly challenges assumptions with facts.

In the United States, for example, many of the social problems of the contemporary black underclass are almost automatically attributed to "a legacy of slavery." The prevalence of fatherless families in the black ghettos, for example, has been widely explained by the lack of legally constituted families under slavery. But if one proceeds beyond plausability and guilt to actually seek out the facts, an entirely different picture emerges.

A hundred years ago, when blacks were just one generation out of slavery, the rate of marriage in the black population of the United States was slightly higher than that of the white population. Most black children were raised in two-parent families, even during the era of slavery, and for generations thereafter. The catastrophic decline of the black nuclear family began, like so many other social catastrophes in the United States, during the decade of the 1960s. Prior to the 1960s, the difference in marriage rates between black and white males was never as great as 5 percentage points. Yet, today, that difference is greater than 20 percentage points - and widening, even though the nuclear family is beginning to decline among white Americans. Whatever explanation for these changes, it lies much closer to today than to the era of slavery, however disappointing that may be to those who prefer to see social issues as moral melodramas.

The tragic and monumental injustice of slavery has often been used as a causal explanation of other social phenomena, applying to both blacks and whites in the Southern United States, where slavery was concentrated - without any check of the facts or comparisons with other and more mundane explanations. The fact that there are large numbers of black Americans today who are not in the labor force has also been one of those things causally (and often rather casually) attributed to slavery. But again, if we go back a hundred years, we find that labor force participation rates among blacks were slightly higher than among whites - and remained so, on past the middle of the twentieth century. If we want to know why this is no longer so, again we must look to events and trends much closer to our own time.